Date of Graduation

8-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Philosophy (MA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Philosophy

Advisor/Mentor

Minar, Edward

Committee Member

Funkhauser, Eric

Second Committee Member

Senor, Thomas

Keywords

First-person authority; Moore's Paradox; Self-knowledge

Abstract

This thesis argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks on Moore’s paradox can be useful in resolving several debates concerning self-knowledge, particularly as that knowledge is manifested in avowals of belief, taking the form of sentences like “I believe that P”. Usually, sentences like these are taken to have a special first-person authority, epistemically privileged in comparison to their third-person counterparts ("He believes that P") and yet free from any reliance on evidence or observation in order to be made justifiably. It is also assumed that these avowals are functioning uniformly as reports on the speaker's mental state. Often, accounts of self-knowledge are set up in opposition to so-called "detectivist" views, which understand avowals to be justified on the basis of observation of my inner states or outward behavior, are therefore likened to a kind of third-person knowledge in which knowing that some other person S believes that P I must requires basing my judgment on observation of some kind, whether it be their behavior, their brain states, what they say, and so on. I discuss two alternatives to detectivism, expressivism and the transparency approach. Expressivism focuses on the way our words may serve to express our mental states in a manner similar to that of primitive expressions of pain, while the transparency approach focuses on the way questions about what we believe are transparent to questions about the world, such that we may answer the former by reflecting on our answer to the latter. Moore's paradox suggests that this way of setting up the issue is mistaken. For the initial assumptions result in a kind of dilemma for the accounts discussed here, with deflationism on one horn and detectivism on the other. For insofar as each view attempts to understand its object of inquiry, the avowal "I believe that P", as being about the speaker they construe our relationship to our beliefs third-personally. The deflationist worry then arises; for unless our avowals are understood as claims about the speaker it is unclear how they can serve as claims to self-knowledge. Escaping this dilemma requires us to recognize that self-ascriptions of belief and the first-person perspective are not a unified phenomenon. We can only account for Moore's paradox if we treat "P, but I don't believe that P" as similar to a contradiction. This requires recognizing how the sentence 'I believe that P' may be equivalent to the assertion 'P'. These two forms of avowal, one outward-facing, the other a self-ascription of the speaker's belief, enable us to properly situate the detectivist and deflationist worries. Avoiding detectivism, requires us to recognize that avowals of belief sometimes function in a manner equivalent to the assertion that P. The demand for prior doxastic knowledge, that I know that I believe that P, is misguided, since it fails to recognize the object of the sentence is the world not the speaker. Avoiding deflationism, however, requires understanding moving beyond an understanding of self-knowledge as exclusively manifested in claims about the speaker.

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